Online Marketing’s Alphabet Soup
Here are some basic definitions of terms and abbreviations used in online marketing:
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): This refers to both Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search efforts to drive traffic to a website through search.
Search Engine Friendly Design (SEFD): SEFD entails steps taken within a site to enhance its programming to yield greater visibility among leading search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO mostly involves taking actions that are external to your website’s programming that will help lead to higher ranking by Google or other search engines. Examples: creating lots of content for your site or having popular third party sites link to yours.
Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC is a service offered by search engines that allows you to purchase specific words or phrases and have a little advert display when someone searches on that word or phrase. Google’s AdWords is an example of PPC.
Clickthrough Percentage (CTR%): The percentage of the people seeing the little advert who click on it. A higher CTR% brings more visitors to your site, and gets your ad preferential treatment from AdWords and other such systems. All else being equal, higher CTR%’s are better—but sometimes an ad with a lower CTR% brings in more qualified prospects, even though fewer of them are clicking.
Cost Per Click (CPC): How much you pay each time a search engine user clicks on your PPC ad. All else being equal, lower CPC’s are better—but some ads with higher CPC’s bring in better-quality visitors than others with lower CPC’s.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM): The cost per thousand impressions of an ad, implying that you are paying per impression (appearance) of the ad rather than per click. This pricing model is standard for banner and video ads, and is also used often for text ads that are placed on non-search websites.
Cost Per View, Cost Per Visit (CPV): These somewhat less common terms confusingly share the same abbreviation. They most often describe the price per impression of pop-up and pop-under ads, which can be considered both “views” and “visits” (though rather involuntary visits!)
Leaderboard: A banner ad that runs the width of a page, and that often (but not always) appears at the page’s top.
Skyscraper: The vertical counterpart of a horizontal banner ad, it’s much taller than it is wide.
Interstitial page: A page (with, in this context, an ad) that loads before some expected piece of content. The ad is usually quite large, and often in video format. There is typically a very small “Skip” or “Proceed to [content source]” link in a corner.
In-text: A pop-up advertising bubble that appears when the user mouses over a word in a page’s text. The word usually has a double underline under it. One challenge involved in creating effective in-text advertising is to find words that genuinely correlate with user interest.
